Sally Esquivel knows first-hand about being homeless in Los Angeles. In 2013 a job with a legal firm didn’t work out and she was unemployed for a long time. She suffered other financial problems, too. She went from renting a Long Beach apartment to staying with friends to staying in her car.
She insists she never really slept during those days and nights in her car, she felt so unsafe, “I stayed overnight inside my car for at least four days. I did not lay down. I sat in the driver’s seat and stayed awake.” She’d spend her days at a coffee place or the beach, but she still had her laptop, so she could look for a safer place to sleep that way.
Through the 211 network, a nonprofit website and call line that links Los Angeles County residents with social services, she found Doors of Hope in Wilmington.
Laura Scotvold-Lemp, the shelter’s director of operations, provided some details via a phone interview. It’s primarily a twenty-bed emergency shelter where “guests” stay for a week or 14 days, although six women designated “program residents” may stay for as long as two years, doing shelter work duties as part of their program. The women are screened during intake hours, 10 a.m.- 1 p.m., six days a week, during which staff makes the determination of whether the women and the shelter are a good fit.
As an example of persons who are screened out, Doors of Hope isn’t a drug-alcohol recovery residence, there are no medical personnel. If someone is actively doing drugs or alcohol, that person is directed elsewhere.
Doors of Hope started in 2011 when Beacon Light Mission expanded its services to include women, according to the shelters’ websites and Scotvold-Lemp’s account. Beacon Light Mission is much older, having begun providing food and shelter to sailors and other men in the Los Angeles Harbor Area in 1902.
As Esquivel describes the living conditions, the sleeping area was one room with twenty twin beds. The bath had stalls to dress and shower in, “We stored our clothing and were given clothes to wear during our stay.” On the same floor there was a sofa, chairs and a computer area and a library. Since her stay there have been some changes but the dormitory-style life remains.
She remembers the women and men shared a dining room, “Dinner was donated, prepared and served by local community organizations. Women, the Doors of Hope residents, sat on one side of the room and the Beacon men’s shelter on the other.”
She and the others were required to leave the space during the day. “I mostly drove back to Long Beach or went to a Starbucks in San Pedro to use my laptop with their wi-fi,” Esquivel said.
She spent her days at Doors of Hope looking for an accounting job but didn’t find any, then, “Near the end of my stay I was referred to a community center in San Pedro where I was given counseling and a housing voucher.” She has since found work with a retail chain, and now lives in an apartment in the city of Orange.
One aspect of life at Doors of Hope that some may find uncomfortable is that the organization is, after all, a Christian mission. Although all faiths and persons of no faith at all are welcome, chapel service every night before dinner is mandatory.
Esquivel admits being alarmed at first, “The first service was very harsh. It sounded like it was directed to those sailors in 1902!” She soon found each service was different, given by different churches, and, as her stay wore on, she found some services and sermons enjoyable.
Scotvold-Lemp says there have been some changes in shelter life since COVID-19 became a major concern. Around mid-March, when libraries and restaurants closed, the shelter made short-term guests and long-term residents stay in all day, no coming or going. Masks, gloves, hand sanitizer, sanitizing—not just cleaning — and daily temperature checks have all become part of the shelter’s routine, although the restriction on going out has been relaxed, for the present.
According to Scotvold-Lemp, Doors of Hope and Beacon Light are funded entirely by private donations. For in-kind donations, such as food and toiletries, she says to call ahead to arrange an appointment.
Filmmaker Michael Moore executive produced the 2019 film, Planet of the Humans. Moore released the film on Youtube for free, so that everyone could see it. Planet of the Humans is intended to cause alarm and destroy sacred cows in the fight against climate change and the broader environmentalist movement.
Jeff Gibbs, a self-described tree hugger and early environmentalist, takes a fire axe to the belief that a profit motive and capitalism are needed to stop climate change and environmental degradation.
The former journalist lived off the grid in a cabin in Michigan, where he wired solar panels and heated the cabin by burning wood instead of contributing to the use of fossil fuels for his energy. He wrote for Mother Earth News, covering protests about mountaintop removal for coal. He also documented the ecosystem collapse and species extinction.
Indeed, Planet of the Humans concludes that no matter how many green energy options humans create, the problem of resource depletion will never be solved without reducing consumption. The film also posits that renewable energy sources, including biomass energy, wind power and solar energy, are not as renewable as they are portrayed to be. And it seems Gibbs’ “sin” is that he does not provide any plan or solution for this extreme issue. More on that later.
The film has been panned by critics for presenting outdated information and not providing dates on events Gibbs claims are important.
That’s not to say Gibbs doesn’t ask valid questions. He does.
Gibbs indicts the whole environmental movement from the Sierra Club to 350.org and its founder, Bill McKibbon. Gibbs tears down Vice President Al “Inconvenient Truth” Gore and Virgin Atlantic airline owner, Sir Richard Branson. Gibbs argues that the that the parts of the environmental movement that chose to get into bed with Wall Street and so-called “green capitalists” are complicit in the stagnation of the movement to reduce the carbon footprint of humans on the earth
Gibbs illustrated this through CNN’s reporting that Gore encouraged Branson to invest in green energy. Branson then pledged future profits from his airline to the tune of $3 billion to fight global warming. This sounded like a great thing, then Gibbs reinforced his point in a cringeworthy scene. Gore and Branson are interviewed in a clip where the interviewer asks Branson, “Is Al Gore a prophet?” Banson responds, “How do you spell prophet?” to remarkably boisterous laughs from the three.
Gibbs argues that the green energy being pushed forward isn’t what it seemed. Through interviews with biofuels, wind and solar energy proponents, Gibbs shines a light on the disconnect between the ideas the movement’s leaders have promoted and the reality of abandoned and dilapidated solar and wind farms. This is contrasted with Gibbs’ interviews of attendees at what appears to be green energy conventions, seemingly — though it’s not indicated — discussing how wind and solar provide only intermittent energy and must be supplemented by coal power or how adding storage to the grid increases the carbon footprint.
Someone Gibbs consulted often in Planet of the Humans is Ozzie Zehner, author of Green Illusions and visiting scholar at Berkeley and Northwestern University. Zehner asserted green energy isn’t replacing coal. He believed in solar and wind energy once but now says it’s an illusion that technologies like solar and wind are different from fossil fuels. He explained, to sustain the world’s largest solar plant, Ivanpah Solar Array in the Mojave Desert, in which the mirrors were built by a company that the Koch brothers control, the facility had to burn natural gas almost daily in order to start up. The plant had to file for permits for acid rain, nitrous oxide emissions and carbon offsets. The plant was built using fossil fuel infrastructure.
Given no timeline there’s no way to tell if these claims are still accurate. But Gibbs interviews multiple people who discuss how solar is ultimately connected to the fossil fuel grid.
The second half of Planet focuses on biofuels and mass deforestation. Scenes showed massive logging operations that left land barren and indigenous people in the Amazon uprooted from their communities after their homes were burned to the ground. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro in 2019, annulled a 10-year-old regulation that had banned the expansion of sugar-cane planted in the Amazon in favor of producing non-food crops for corn ethanol, which has created an even larger carbon footprint.
Planet shows the biomass movement is also supported by the Sierra Club and colleges like Middlebury College in Vermont, where they have a biomass gasification system. Biomass plants highlighted in green saturate a United States map in what appears to be thousands of plants. Further, the United States exports biomass to Europe, where they also import from Brazil, Indonesia and British Columbia.
“Biomass, especially when you add in biofuels, is by far the largest portion of green energy around the world,” Gibbs said.
Meanwhile, Gibbs spoke to protesters against fossil fuels at rallies who objected to the use of biofuels.
The other issue raised in the film received only brief focus — population growth. Gibbs asserted each climate change expert he spoke to cited this issue, however, no real discussion occurred past the mention of it. Faced with how to cope with this problem — since we’re already here — it seems logical to do more with less. This point is worthy of more examination on a large scale.
In regards to the previously mentioned “sin”of presenting no solution, Gibbs offered his take on the problems humanity faces.
“It took humans tens of thousands of years to reach a population of 700 million,” Gibbs said. “When humans tapped into millions of years of stored energy [fossil fuels], our population exploded … our energy consumption exploded too, on average 10 times per person and many times more in the western world. Put the two together, the total human impact is 100 times greater than 200 years ago.
“We humans are poised for a fall from an unimaginable height not because of one thing, not because of climate change but because of all the human-caused changes the planet is suffering from.”
From here, Gibbs’ examined humanity’s problem with coming to terms with death. He spoke to social psychologist at Skidmore College, Sheldon Solomon. Gibbs presented an analogy saying, the right has religion and believes in infinite fossil fuels. The left has green energy, solar and wind, a religion in itself.
“Could it be our denial of death?” Gibbs asked. “Could it be that we can’t face our own mortality? Could we have a religion that we are unaware of?”
This led to Gibbs’ epiphany.
“If we do not come to grips with our own death and are presented with a reminder of that [climate change], we are likely to make some tragic solutions for the community,” he said.
This could be the essential reason why Gibbs made this film with no convenient solutions to offer.
“There’s only one solution,” Solomon responded. “As [philosopher, author and journalist], Albert Camus said, ‘There’s only one liberty, to come to terms with death, thereafter, anything is possible.’”
Left with this explanation, Gibbs calls on humans to live more with less. The necessary explanation or solution before ourselves is it’s up to the human race to discover and teach one another how to survive on less consumption on a grand scale in order to realize freedom from the existential threat that we created.
Capt. Ahab confronted by naked white Athena in Portland retreats
“I want to see young people in America feel the spirit of the 1960s and find a way to get in the way. To find a way to get in trouble. Good trouble, necessary trouble.”—Rep. John Robert Lewis (February 21, 1940 – July 17, 2020)
I’m often stopped on the street by people wanting to know what’s going on in town and I invariably hand them a copy of this newspaper and tell them to get off of social media and read something. Almost as frequently they end with a salutation of, “Stay out of trouble.” To which I reply, “What fun would that be?” Meaning the same kind of “good trouble” our hero John Lewis was talking about.
Lewis was arrested more than 40 times during the 1960s for his civil rights work. His heroism is reminiscent of a former resident of San Pedro, union organizer Pat Chambers, who held the distinction of getting arrested 80 times in one month during the 1933 cotton strikes in the San Joaquin Valley. Noted historian Kenneth Starr documented this struggle in histories of California, called Americans and the California Dream.
So there’s good trouble and bad. But what we are seeing across America today is a new generation of activists engaging in good trouble! And I admire their tenacity in the fight against injustice and mostly non-violent protests in the interest of causing good trouble.
Sure, there’re a few extremists in every crowd but not like there was during the anti-war movement during the Vietnam War days, but then much of that was caused by instigators who were paid to infiltrate leftist groups and start the bad trouble to discredit the movement. This shouldn’t be dismissed as a possibility in today’s troubles. Caution is advised in the reporting on all of this as it becomes clear that the man who is running to remain president has been known to lie, cheat and otherwise abuse his power of his office to keep everything confused. Truth is a rare commodity these days.
So for these past months, like many of you, I’ve been trying to find a precedent for the times we are living in. And I first thought that Donald Trump is most like Caligula Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus; the third emperor of Rome. In the first six months of his rule he was described by historians as a noble and moderate ruler. Today he is only remembered for his cruelty, sadism, extravagance and sexual perversions — an insane tyrant. Historians have described Caligula as working to increase the unconstrained personal power of the emperor, as opposed to countervailing powers within the state –– sounds like a close match but I’m not sure.
Sometimes I even think that what we are witnessing is some perverted version of Shakespeare’s King Lear. Though it seems apparent that Trump is starting to lose his grip on “his kingdom” and his own mind, it is doubtful he would ever step down and bequeath his reign to his daughter.
I’ve come to the conclusion that Trump’s rule is an American saga that mirrors Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. The protagonist Captain Ahab, not unlike Trump, is obsessed with a monster that has injured him and he sets off to get even with the great white leviathan, Moby Dick. Now most of this tale is about hunting whales and yet the truth is it’s about a deeply flawed man doing battle with nature or God and himself. He is willing to sacrifice his crew, his ship and ultimately himself to kill the very beast that has done him wrong. In the end he accomplishes it all. And he leaves just one lone survivor floating on a wooden coffin to be rescued. It’s a powerful metaphor.
Is Trump’s great white whale American racism or is it the very republic that he so erratically criticizes even while commanding it chaotically? And is he willing to wreck the ship of state to attain these very same ends out of some invisible vengeance? Perhaps his niece’s book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man will reveal more of his psychosis. All I can tell you is that he — with all his cruelty, lies, extravagance and sexual perversions — was confronted this week. Trump’s assembled hodgepodge of federal law enforcement officers in Portland, Ore., were confronted not by a great white whale on July 17 as they defended the federal courthouse against Black Lives Matter protests, but by the singular image of a completely naked (except for a mask) white female.
And as reported in the Willamette Week she danced, posed and then sat down with legs spread as the federal agents continued firing rounds of tear gas and rubber bullets — missing her. And then they simply stopped and retreated. These well-armed officers just weren’t up to shooting, nor arresting, a naked white woman. No one knows her name for sure but she has been dubbed “Athena” by social media. In Greek mythology Athena’s strengths are rational, intelligent, a powerful defender in war but also a potent peacemaker.
To some this conjures up the iconic picture of a lone Chinese man standing down a tank at the Tiananmen Square protest in 1989. A singular act of courage against the odds.
The following day, dozens of mothers wearing white and helmets attended. They stood arm-in-arm with each other, forming a barrier between federal agents and demonstrators. The gathering came after a report that unidentified federal officers from unknown agencies have been driving around and renditioning suspects off the streets like we’ve seen in the past in Pinchot’s dictatorship in Chile. The groups of mothers are called the “Wall of Moms.”
They along with the naked Athena and others have gotten into some good trouble as Captain Ahab DJT steers the Pequod ship of state ever closer to the brink of disaster and into bad trouble for the nation.
On second thought perhaps Trump is also his own manifestation of Moby Dick himself and what we are witnessing is his delusional battle with his own demons –– on this point I defer to his psychologist niece Mary Trump.
A look at the good, the bad in the Paycheck Protection Program
The Paycheck Protection Program was intended to be a lifeline for small businesses when it became clear that the COVID-19 pandemic had put jobs and the economy in clear and present danger. Part of the CARES Act coronavirus relief bill, PPP was supposed to help small businesses — those with fewer than 500 employees and relatively few financial resources — keep employees on their payroll. Congress passed the bill in record time, despite lingering questions about whether oversight would be strong enough to ensure that only small businesses get the billions of dollars in aid.
Several big corporations that signed up for the federally backed loans — low cost loans that could be potentially forgiven — returned the money, most notably restaurant chains Shake Shack, Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse, and Potbelly. Investigative journalists with ProPublica found at least 15 large corporations receiving loans through their subsidiaries.
Less attention has been paid to the small businesses that received the loans and how they are fairing. In interviews with local business, Random Lengths News learned about the initial difficulty of the applications and the anxiety of small business owners over whether the other federal government stimulus efforts would sabotage their efforts to bring back laid off workers, particularly those earning more on unemployment than the wages they were previously earning.
President Donald Trump didn’t want to reveal who got the PPP loans, but 11 major American news organizations, including American City Business Journals, forced him to via lawsuit.
After weeks of legal challenges, on July 6 the U.S. Small Business Administration released a redacted slice of Paycheck Protection Program data that identifies major recipients as well as the jobs supported by the $659 billion program during the country’s initial economic hit from the coronavirus pandemic.
Though the July 6 data release provides the most-detailed data yet about the program, it falls short of the transparency sought by the news media lawsuit, which was initially filed May 12, in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. Rather than identifying specific loan amounts, the data is bracketed in buckets ranging from $150,000 to $350,000; $350,000 to $1 million; $1 million to $2 million; $2 million to $5 million; and $5 million to $10 million.
What was unsurprising was the number and nature of the corporations that applied for the loans that exceeded $1 million in the Los Angeles Harbor Area, where a significant chunk of the applicants are tied to the twin ports goods movement industry. Another sizeable amount went to nonprofit organizations which include a large amount of charter schools.
In San Pedro, 11 companies received more than $1 million. Among them was former Harbor Commission President Nick Tonsich’s company Ocean Terminal Services, which received $5 to $10 million. Random Lengths News has reported that the company is embroiled in a civil suit.
Other businesses or corporations that received PPP loans in the millions include: Catalina Channel Express Inc.; Al Larson Boat Shop; San Pedro Fish Market LLC; Boys & Girls Clubs of the Los Angeles Harbor; Advent Resources Inc.; Port of Los Angeles High School; Jankovich Co.; Westwind Engineering Inc.; So Cal Ship Services Inc.; and Rolling Hills Preparatory School.
In Wilmington, 10 companies received more than $1 million: American Integrated Services Inc.; Patriot Environmental Services Inc.; Harbor Industrial Services Corp.; Tony Demaria Electric, Inc.; Konoike Transport Co. Ltd.; Innovative Terminal Services Inc.; Pac Anchor Transportation Inc.; Gssi Inc., Potential Industries Inc.; and American Soccer Co. Inc.
In Carson, 27 companies received $1 million or more in Paycheck Protection loans. More than one hundred companies in Long Beach received $1 million.
According to the Los Angeles Economic Development Corp., California’s share of the PPP loans was $68.2 billion or about 13 percent. Researchers with LAEDC noted that regardless of the problems of the PPP, there was no doubt that the loans helped Californians to keep working and maintain their solvency of their households to prop up the economy. But now there is fear about what a renewed shutdown order would do to businesses in Los Angeles.
There has been a gradual increase in COVID-19 positivity rates since the reopening of businesses in Los Angeles County, leading to Gov. Gavin Newsom issuing new shutdown orders for dine-in restaurants, bars, malls, salons and barber shops. While there is discussion in Congress of doling out another round of stimulus checks to tide Americans over, the Trump administration is looking to tie those monies to cuts in payroll taxes, which pays into Social Security. Also, the Republican Senate majority is preferring a stimulus with significantly less benefits. There’s still $120 billion left to make a few more PPP loans and there’s discussion about reopening the application process for that money. After July 31, when the extra $600 in federal weekly unemployment benefits ends, many Angelenos could find themselves under further lockdown orders and economically dark days ahead.
Update: The print edition of Random Lengths News misidentified U.S. Nick Trutanich in a photo cutline. We regret the error and any confusion it has caused.
Violent instigators have hijacked peaceful protests and demonstrations.— U.S. AttorneyNick Trutanich
Early on in the wave of Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the police murder of George Floyd, Donald Trump, in a signature move, tried to shift blame onto a personal bogeyman.
“It’s ANTIFA and the Radical Left. Don’t lay the blame on others!” he tweeted on May 30. “The United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization,” he tweeted the next day.
CORRECTION — In the July 23 edition of Random Lengths, in the story “The Truth About Antifa” a photo of U.S. Attorney Nicholas A. Trutanich was misidentified. We regret the error. — Terelle Jerricks, Managing Editor
It was just one of many conspiratorial narratives spread via Fox News and social media as public opinion changed dramatically, baffling Trump and his supporters alike.
Experts quickly refuted Trump, noting that Antifa isn’t even an organization, but rather an organizing philosophy — militant anti-fascism — much less a foreign, international organization, which it would have to be for that designation to apply. What’s more, the story on the ground was precisely the opposite.
“Violent instigators have hijacked peaceful protests and demonstrations across the country, including Nevada, exploiting the real and legitimate outrage over Mr. Floyd’s death for their own radical agendas,” said U.S. Attorney Nick Trutanich, the son of former Los Angeles City Attorney Carmen Trutanich, on June 3, as he announced charges against three rightwing extremists. “Law enforcement is focused on keeping violence and destruction from interfering with free public expression and threatening lives.
The arrests came from the Joint Terrorism Task Force involving the FBI, U.S. Attorney’s Office, the Clark County District Attorney’s Office and the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. A press release identified the three men as “alleged members of the ‘Boogaloo’ movement — a term used by extremists to signify a coming civil war and/or collapse of society.”
More precisely, most “Boogaloo Bois,” as they call themselves, look forward to a racial civil war — the exact opposite of the historic shift in public consciousness shown by demonstrations in the wake of Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police.
The arrests had been made on May 30, the same day as Trump’s baseless tweet. But the pairing of Trump’s conspiratorial Antifa fantasy and the cold hard facts of Boogaloo terrorism was hardly an isolated occurrence. Trump’s fantasy was all-encompassing, while the facts were all against him — despite a flood of false rumors about mythical busloads of bloodthirsty Antifa protesters out to pillage lily-white communities from Curry County, Ore., just north of California on the Pacific Coast, to Sparta, Ill., “where they will be directed to target rural white Americans by burning farm houses and killing livestock,” according to Mike Adams from NaturalNews.com and other equally preposterous targets.
Rightwing Terrorist Threat is Real
On June 16, the Department of Justice announced two more Boogaloo arrests for the May 29 murder of Pat Underwood, who was guarding the Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building in Oakland. Another officer was wounded in that attack, and a Santa Cruz County Deputy Sheriff was killed apprehending one of the suspects a week later.
Then on June 23, San Antonio Fox affiliate KABB announced the June 8 Drug Enforcement Administration’s arrest of a “Boogaloo Bois” body-builder for steroid trafficking, with further charges possible. Another “Boogaloo Bois” body-builder had been arrested two months earlier, on April 11, in a different part of Texas, after he reportedly used Facebook Live to show himself attempting to murder police.
But none of this was surprising to the consortium of 17 spy agencies collectively known as the U.S. Intelligence Community, according to a Department of Homeland Security report secretly published on June 1, and leaked to The Nation magazine six weeks later. It bluntly began:
“The Intelligence Community reports that Domestic Violent Extremists (DVEs) who support ‘Boogaloo’ could exploit the current political and social environments to conduct attacks in the United States, and pose a potential threat to law enforcement.”
But the “Boogaloo Bois” are simply the latest variation on a much older theme.
In mid-June, the Center for Strategic & International Studies issued a report stating that “right-wing attacks and plots accounted for the majority of all terrorist incidents in the United States since 1994. In particular, they made up a large percentage of incidents in the 1990s and 2010s,” and that “the total number of right-wing attacks and plots has grown substantially during the past six years.”
Specifically, they perpetrated two-thirds of the terrorist attacks and plots in 2019, and over 90 percent of them between January 1 and May 8, 2020.
Similar figures came from the Anti-Defamation League’s annual Murder and Extremism report, released in February, which found that 38 of the 42 extremist-related murders in the United States in 2019 were committed by right-wing ideologues, including white supremacists. They also accounted for “330 deaths over the course of the last decade,” 76 percent of the total due to domestic extremist-related murder.
The New Conspiracism
But Trump’s style of minimalist conspiracist assertion is ideally suited to disregarding facts. It typifies what’s described as the “new conspiracism” in the 2019 book, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy, whose authors I interviewed for Salon last year. This “new conspiracism,” co-author Nancy Rosenblum told me, “offers an opportunity for people to assent” not “to a theory, an explanation of something,” but “to the aggressiveness and the targetedness of the conspiracists’ claim.”
Because there’s no specific content at the heart of Trump’s Antifa conspiracy fantasy, it’s impervious to factual refutation. And it serves as a perfect cover story for his own authoritarian scheming. At the same time he tweeted his Antifa accusation, he pushed farther, tweeting out a threat:
“Crossing State lines to incite violence is a FEDERAL CRIME! Liberal Governors and Mayors must get MUCH tougher or the Federal Government will step in and do what has to be done, and that includes using the unlimited power of our Military and many arrests. Thank you!”
Thanks, indeed for threatening to violate the 1877 Posse Comitatus Act, by using the military as domestic police. It’s arguably the favorite federal statute of Trump’s hard right white supremacist supporters, since it put an end to the use of U.S. Army troops to protect against racist terror in the South. But since the threatened violation was aimed at their common enemy — the militant anti-fascists of Antifa — there was barely a whisper of dissent.
Trump’s Jack-Booted Thugs
Six weeks later, on the streets of Portland, we saw what Trump had in mind: an unidentified secret police force, kidnapping citizens at will, like a Latin American dictatorship during the Nixon or Reagan administrations.
In justification Acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf issued a July 16 press release condemning “The Rampant Long-Lasting Violence In Portland,” repeatedly blaming “violent anarchists” without any evidence of who they actually were, for a long list of grievances, including 20 incidents of spray-painting graffiti and 13 of setting off fireworks.
A unified chorus of state and local officials — including U.S. senators — condemned the actions.
“Authoritarian governments, not democratic republics, send unmarked authorities after protesters,” Oregon U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley tweeted that same day. “These Trump/Barr tactics designed to eliminate any accountability are absolutely unacceptable in America, and must end.”
“As best as I can tell, this is an effort — a last gasp effort — by a failed president with sagging polling data, who’s trying to look strong for his base,” Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler told NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro on July 19. “He’s actually using the federal police function in support of his candidacy.”
“We don’t have a secret police in this country. This is not a dictatorship,” Oregon Gov. Kate Brown told NPR on July 19. “Trump needs to get his officers off the streets.”
Rather than listening to others, Trump played misunderstood.
“We are trying to help Portland, not hurt it,” he tweeted that same day. “Their leadership has, for months, lost control of the anarchists and agitators. They are missing in action. We must protect Federal property, AND OUR PEOPLE. These were not merely protesters, these are the real deal!”
But again, this stood reality on its head. The size of protests had dwindled to a few hundred over the course of seven weeks, but rose to about two thousand in response to the federal presence, according to media reports. On July 19, a “wall of moms” aka “momtifa” formed to protect the protesters. It was organized by Bev Barnum, 35, after seeing videos of the federal forces in action.
“We are about protecting peaceful citizens’ right to protest,” Barnum told BuzzFeed News. “We wanted to look like we were going to Target, like normal people.”
The moms’ presence subdued the federal forces for several hours, but eventually, Trump’s troops attacked with tear gas, flash-bangs and pepper spray.
And the next day, Trump doubled down even more.
“We’re looking at Chicago, too. We’re looking at New York,” he said from the White House. “We’re looking at Chicago, and New York, and Detroit, and Baltimore, and all of these … Oakland is a mess. We’re not going to let this happen in our country.”
What’s happening is mostly peaceful protests — the most broadly-supported protest movement in American history, according to recent polls. And Trump is on the wrong side, along with his white Christian nationalist base. His utter failure to protect the country from COVID-19 is only making matters even worse.
But the confusion he’s sown around Antifa remains a dangerous distraction that needs clearing up — first about Antifa itself and then about how his conspiracy mongering mixes with and supercharges other sources of disinformation.
Antifa Demystified
In early July, Natasha Lennard wrote a useful introduction to Antifa, for Vice.
“Antifa is not an organization. There are no official ‘antifa leaders;’ there are no official members. There is no centralized leadership board or committee,” she wrote. “Antifa is best understood as a practice, or a set of tactics, which groups can take up and deploy; and sometimes certain collectives use the label ‘antifa’ to describe themselves.’” (This is far more common in Britain, where scores of such groups can be found online.)
Lennard introduced an analogy from historian Mark Bray, author of Antifa: An Anti-fascist Handbook. “To call antifa an organization, he wrote, is ‘like calling bird-watching an organization. Yes, there are bird-watching organizations as there are antifa organizations, but neither bird-watching nor antifa is an organization.’”
While Antifa’s origins stretch back to anti-Nazi street-fighters of the 1920s and 30s, “Physical force is just one string in the antifa bow,” Lennard explained. “The whole bow is focused on doing whatever is necessary to render racist extremists unable to gather, organize, and spread hateful ideologies.”
Some liberals abhor this, under the banner of “free speech,” but Europeans — especially Germans — who have experienced the horror of fascism first-hand, have long seen things differently, and Antifa activists share that understanding.
“Antifa practices understand that the desire for fascism is not something based on reason, so it is not something to be reasoned out of.” Lennard wrote. “The point at the very heart of antifa action is to make unpleasant, real-life consequences for those people who would engage in fascist organizing. If the sense of power, domination and belonging is what makes fascism appealing—why young white men are jumping on board—militant anti-fascist action is about shutting down that appeal.”
One might disagree with this argument, but it’s clearly a principled one, and one that doesn’t sanction widespread violence, as it’s often mis-portrayed. Of course, it can be corrupted and abused — as any principled position can be. But it is not inherently lawless, irrational or senseless in a “mirror image of fascism” as too many ignorant critics allege.
New and Old Conspiracism Combined
So, what about Antifa conspiracy theories? Trump’s ‘new conspiracism’ is perhaps the easiest to understand, as noted above: there’s nothing to it but broad emotional/attitudinal appeal.
“They’re bad people” has no more real empirical content to it than racism does. “I don’t like them and you can’t make me,” is all that it really boils down to.
But there are also classic conspiracy theories to consider. The essence of them is that some small group of people are pulling the strings to secretly and malevolently control history, and that only a dedicated band of fearless truth-tellers can expose them and thus save the world.
Two canonical examples in the Western world are anti-Semitism — dating back at least to the Middle Ages — and the Illuminati conspiracy theory, dating back to the 1790s, when they were blamed for the French Revolution. Tellingly, the Illuminati did not exist, having been disbanded under severe criminal penalties almost two decades earlier. European Jews certainly did exist, but the power they had was extremely limited, defined almost entirely by powerful Christian elites, who used t hem as middlemen, intermediaries and scapegoats.
Conspiracy theories involving Antifa take on multiple forms, including both of these classics. First, a la the Bavarian Illuminati are claims about its very existence. Of course, unlike the Illuminati, Antifa does exist. But, as Lennard and Bray explain, not in anything like the way it’s assumed to. Antifa brings together people with diverse political and ideological views around a shared opposition to fascism. It typically comprises local groups, not top-down regional, national or international organizations — the most inhospitable way to run a conspiracy. And, its planning revolves around responding to specific threats, not long-range world domination. Because it’s a coalition of diverse ideologies it couldn’t possibly be otherwise.
Second, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories are second nature where fascists are concerned, so naturally Antifa is a target for them. A good example in circulation today is that George Soros is funding them. He was also accused of funding the entire wave of George Floyd/Black Lives Matter protests, so why not Antifa as well?
In fact, accusations of Antifa’s involvement opened the floodgates, so that any conspiracy theories about the protests could mutate or adapt to include Antifa as well. Rumors hyping Antifa’s supposed omnipresence and/or string pulling are examples of classic conspiracism in action, tropes that have been around for so long, they can be feed from a wide range of sources. The rapid, unexpected spread of Black Lives Matter protests — even to some overwhelmingly white communities — surely helped prime fears, which conspiracy-peddlers preyed on. And those peddlers, in turn, ran the whole gamut, from the white nationalist group Identity Evropa, whose role was spotted early on, to self-described democratic socialist Adam Rahuba, a prankster unmasked by The Washington Post, who recently explained that he antagonizes far-right extremists mostly for his own amusement.
Such is the nature of conspiracy theories: because they’re unmoored from reality, they can be harnessed to do almost anything — at least, in the minds of those who deploy them. But how they end up in practice can be a whole other matter.
Right now, Trump is using the fantasy threat of Antifa to justify the lawless deployment of federal troops in Portland—and who knows how many other cities to come. In doing so, he’s acting out the fascist playbook that first gave rise to Antifa almost 100 years ago. We can only imagine what this will look like 100 years from now.
On July 13, the Northwest San Pedro Neighborhood Council voted 9-2 to support the appeal of a four-story apartment complex at 1309-1331 S. Pacific Ave. in San Pedro. Board members Rock Ashfield and Bron D’Angelo voted against supporting the appeal.
In April, the Los Angeles City Planning Commission unanimously approved the development. Coastal San Pedro Neighborhood Council and Central San Pedro Neighborhood Council supported the appeal prior.
This past November, both NWSPNC and Central SPNC voted to support the project but suggested changes.
“In part, we were pleased that they were not asking for an exemption to parking requirements,” said Diana Nave, chairwoman of the NWSPNC’s Planning and Land Use Committee. “We also felt that this part of Pacific was a riskier area to develop than in some of the other projects we had reviewed.”
The development is 45-feet tall and is on the west side of Pacific Avenue, between 13th and 14th Street. The project will have 102 units — a dozen of them for very low-income tenants — and 127 parking spaces.
The appeal of the development deals primarily with the impact and interpretation of the state density bonus, Nave said.
“This is a law under which developers can get certain incentives and waivers in exchange for inclusion of a certain number of income-restricted units,” she said.
NWSPC opposed the density bonus law before it passed because it would be disruptive to the community plan, she said.
The developer used the state density bonus ordinance to request several variances, i.e. a relaxing of restrictions.
Jonathan Lonner, a representative of Burns & Bouchard Inc. — the company that is representing RKD 13 PAC. LP, which owns the property — said that since the Los Angeles City Planning Commission approval in April, there have been no changes to the size or scope of the project. However, a community group called Citizens Protecting San Pedro appealed the commission’s decision.
NWSPNC’s resolution in support of the appeal points out that the project does not conform to the Local Community Plan, the Community Plan Implementation Ordinance, and the Pacific Corridor Redevelopment Plan. In addition, a letter that the NWSPNC approved to send to Councilman Joe Buscaino and the Los Angeles Planning Department contended that the formula used to calculate traffic impacts was inaccurate.
“You might hear this appeal is just a policy difference of opinion and that the city is doing what the state allows,” said Coastal San Pedro Neighborhood Council member Robin Rudisill, who also chairs her council’s Planning and Transportation Committee. “That is nonsense. Those are just excuses. We’ve poured over both the state and the city regulations. This is not a policy issue. In this appeal, we’re talking about city planners who are making serious errors and abusing their discretion in approving this project.”
Citizens Protecting San Pedro had a lawyer look at the project and summarize the many ways the city violates its own law in approving it, Rudisill said.
“In the appeal, we show how the city violated their regulations,” Rudisill said. “But even looking at it big picture, it’s clear on its face that a 77% floor area ratio bonus and a 55% height bonus are too much to ask for them to provide just 12 affordable units.”
Rudisill said that if this is not done correctly, it will haunt the community on every project that follows.
“The city’s violating and abusing their own laws,” Rudisill said. “It’s not fair to us community members or the developers, for that matter.”
Rudisill said that Citizens Protecting San Pedro is in favor of a project at 1309-1331 S. Pacific Ave, but not one like this.
“Every day we learn of more corruption within our city and we must do all we can to not let it happen in San Pedro,” Rudisill said.
The density bonus law requires the floor-to-area ratio and height be on-menu items, Rudisill said. On-menu items are a relaxation of zoning requirements that can be earned by things like providing a certain amount of affordable housing, or being close to a major transit center.
“But when the project didn’t meet the requirements as on-menu items, the city allowed the applicant to then move them off-menu,” Rudisill said. “But that’s not allowed. And, that’s one of our main appeal points.”
What can be an on-menu item and what can be an off-menu item are very specific and they cannot be interchanged, Rudisill said.
Lonner said the appeal was factually incorrect in what the density bonus provisions allow, but he did not elaborate. Instead, he thanked the NWSPNC for including him in the discussion, as the other neighborhood councils did not invite him or the company he represents to speak when they voted on the appeal.
“It’s an attempt by a couple people that don’t want a project in their neighborhood to happen in yours,” Lonner said.
There have been similar projects approved in San Pedro, and in the city and state, Lonner said.
NWSPNC Treasurer Melanie Labrecque said her family lives next to the development and that traffic there is very heavy. One of the intersections it intersects with, 13th Street and Pacific, is busy and there have been many accidents there, she said.
“To add 107 units like right there, it’s very concerning,” Lebrecque said. “That’s a lot of density to add to that very congested area as it is right there on Pacific.”
Lee Williams, chairman of the San Pedro Chamber of Commerce, said it is important to make sure that affordable housing is part of every development in San Pedro.
“I like the idea of spreading the affordable units out, instead of creating ghettos and low-income like sections of San Pedro,” Williams said. “It’s nice to have various income levels living together in different neighborhoods so that we can get that homogenized interaction.”
Williams said he did not want to discuss the appeal, because from what he had heard from the city, it has little merit.
Danial Nord, who has lived, worked and owned property on Pacific Avenue for 18 years, said he wants to see responsible development on Pacific, but this development is irresponsible.
“The applicant has created and uploaded a document called ‘applicant rebuttal,’ attempting to legalize their dismissal of our community concerns,” Nord said. “They distort and obfuscate a few cherry-picked points, while completely omitting the most important issues, like falsified traffic and air quality studies, cumulative impacts, a high injury network … tsunami and emergency services routes, insufficient affordable housing, and violating community and redevelopment plans.”
Nord said that the developers are flippers, and they are not planning on building anything.
“They’re violating all these rules to secure outrageous entitlements to the lot so they can turn around and flip the entitled lot and walk away with a load of cash,” Nord said.
Flipping like this inflates housing costs by adding middlemen, Nord said. While 12 very-low-income units will be built, 90 market-rate units will be built as well — and there are already 490 empty market-rate apartments in San Pedro.
San Pedro resident Allen Franz said that if built, the project will be profitable, but it won’t be safe, livable or sustainable.
“We need, for San Pedro as a whole, a clear precedent that Los Angeles Municipal Code, that the San Pedro Community Plan, the CPIO, and the Pacific Avenue Redevelopment corridor — which the community developed — have value,” Franz said. “We’re not doormats for anybody with a wad of cash to come in and put in whatever they want.”
This article was updated to reflect the fact that the city is aiming to pay for some capital improvements to local parks by way of using unused funds from fiscal year 2019-2020 and that the City of Carson general fund reserve stands at $35 million.
Carson’s Finance Department is not allowing COVID-19 to hinder its budget process.
City Manager Sharon Landers, who works with the finance office to formulate, format and present the budget, cited organization as the key to the efficiency of Carson’s budget process.
“You want to adopt a budget on time so you can keep your finances on track,” Landers said. “The longer it takes beyond the fiscal year to adopt a budget, the bigger your gap can become and the deeper the cuts you might need to address it.”
Creating this year’s $86.9 million budget required a different mindset than usual because of the conditions COVID-19 created. Council members and city staff had to consider an estimated $2 million loss in sales tax revenue, an estimated $2.3 million loss in license and permit tax revenue, close to $1 million in franchise tax revenue and thousands from various community service programs, then recalculate expenses accordingly. Cuts came from throughout the budget — enough to make up for the losses and leave $20 million in reserves for future spending decisions.
“We were able to reduce our expenses very strategically by around $10 million,” Landers said. “The biggest single savings was a reduction in our pension liability costs for this single year by almost $6 million by issuing a pension obligation bond. The next two large reductions of just over $2 million each are for non-personnel operations expenses and maintaining a vacancy rate of 6 percent. Our current vacancy rate from staff attrition is 12 percent.”
The city focused on ensuring that a lot of its employees kept their jobs and the city continued rendering services to its constituents. It also implemented good budget management tools. The council’s decision to move forward with the pension obligation bond saved $6 million for the upcoming fiscal year, which makes up for some of the losses from one of the nation’s worst economic statuses.
“This smart initiative, along with precision belt tightening has enabled us to balance the budget, maintaining our current levels of service to the community and with no staff layoffs,” Landers said. “I’m very proud that we were able to adopt a budget that maintains the same levels of services and doesn’t lay off any of our employees.”
The city spends almost 48 percent of its budget on employee salaries. Thirty-two percent of that is used to pay city employees in the public works department and 29 percent of it to the community services department. With the cuts in community services during the stay-at-home and social distancing orders and closures of various city entities and locations, they focused on keeping their staff fully employed throughout the pandemic.
“The amount budgeted to public works enables that department to maintain its current level of operations with no cuts in service,” Landers said. “The budget for community development is to a great extent an indication of the projected level of development we are expecting to occur.”
The city council was estimating its fund balance to be $43 million before the virus hit. It is reducing its fund by $10 million even though the projected revenue loss is only $5 million. The biggest revenue losses are projected to come from licenses and permits — a combined $2.3 million loss. The city isn’t projecting a loss in property tax revenue. Carson is a low-generating property tax city.
The city’s contract with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department was boosted by about $2 million for a fiscal year total of $22 million. The sheriff’s contract had been discussed already and the increase is unrelated to recent events surrounding protests.
Carson holds three budget workshops to keep the community involved and informed throughout the budget process. Normally they’re held in public, but this year because of COVID-19 they were online. The budget is deconstructed each session and then recreated. Residents can watch the budget workshop sessions and then submit comments during the council meetings.
The $35 million in reserve will play a key role this fiscal year as COVID-19 is still ravaging the nation’s economy and human health. The reserve fund is important as a safety net to the continued costs of the virus.
“The impacts of COVID have been felt throughout the budget,” Landers said. “It has impacted both revenue and expense projections and has been taken into account how the city is moving forward.”
Viewed on their own, presented without context, coronavirus numbers don’t always give an accurate picture of how the pandemic is being handled. Here, ProPublica journalists Caroline Chen and Ash Ngu offer insight on how to navigate the figures.
LONG BEACH — The City of Long Beach has issued a Health Order that will provide access to COVID-19 diagnostic testing at all healthcare facilities throughout the city.
Effective July 31, all healthcare facilities in Long Beach must provide testing to all symptomatic individuals as well as asymptomatic individuals who may have been exposed or meet other criteria. The expansion of diagnostic testing is essential because it helps identify individuals who are infectious with the virus that causes COVID-19, ensure those individuals isolate and receive appropriate care, better understand the spread of the disease and ultimately prevent serious illness and death.
Long Beach recently announced changes to testing sites and hours to boost capacity for COVID-19 testing. The new testing hours will enable the city, together with the State-run site at Jordan Plus High School, a capacity of more than 1,400 per day (up from 1,000) — the most robust testing capacity ever for long Beach and almost double the State’s requirement. Appointments can be made online or by calling 562.570.INFO (4636). Free testing is offered to all residents of Long Beach, Signal Hill, Lakewood, Paramount and Compton.
Willamette Week reported July 21, that Portland City Commissioner, Chloe Eudaly said federal officers are doing Portland cops’ dirty work— using brutal tactics that local agencies would struggle to get away with at protests.
Trump sent officers from four federal agencies to control the protests in Portland. The local Portland police and federal police worked together to clear protesters last weekend, which set off accusations inside City Hall about the complicity of the local police with federal actions.
